Servers

A friend of mine is a mathematics tutor and I offered to help her pick up a few new students. So I just whipped up a little one-page website for her. I like doing this simple stuff because it makes a big difference over having no website at all and it doesn't cost me too much effort. Something I can cram in to my busy schedule.

Express 3.0 removed partials and layouts and now expects the template engine to take care of them. Many tutorials and helpful websites are now "broken". Here's how to make the NodeTutes Episode 10 work:

GORM is very functional but not totally intuitive - every time I model relationships I again have to consult the Grails user guide to remember the differences between all the options. So I’ve written a quick-reference. This is a work in progress so there might be errors, sorry!

Do you find that activity monitoring applications like pedometers don't work (receive events / count steps) when your phone screen is switched off? It's not a bug in Android itself but rather a choice or bug of the hardware manufacturer. Some phones work, some phones don't. If you're looking to buy a new phone and you need the accelerometer to work in standby mode (with screen off), this guide might help you. It's a list of information I collected about the issue on the internet. In each case I've listed the source - where I got the information so you can look it up yourself.

The title says it all; referring to Grails and the fact that static access to the grailsApplication object is now deprecated. So how are you supposed to do it? The answer thanks to Burt Beckwith is in this post: static grailsApplication access from a domain class. Thanks Burt. The chance that anyone else ever searches this complicated concept in the same terms as me is somewhat rare… but if they do they will no doubt be happy to find this post.

Greg Sims wrote me an email the other day asking for some Drupal 7 internationalisation architecture advice, having seen the Christian Assemblies International website for which I’m the tech lead. Here is his email (reproduced with permission), my answers interspersed.

You want to be cool, innovative, open and all that. Or perhaps, you just want your videos to work on iOS. Either way you’re going to have to replace Flash video with HTML5 video on your website. This is a practical guide to HTML5 video solutions for those that need subtitles or captions (the “track” element) to be available on their videos.